Digital Archive: The Joseph Dalton Hooker Website

Of Victorian England’s perambulating naturalists, Charles Darwin is the most celebrated. But he was only one of many, a throng of young men and women who left British shores for places unknown including Joseph Banks, Alfred Russell Wallace, Thomas Huxley, Mary Kingsley, and Henry Walter Bates. These were not foppish lads and doe-eyed ingénues on vacation. They followed new, dangerous itineraries: into the Pacific and Polar Regions, the interiors of South America and Africa, and the islands and archipelagos of the Indian Ocean. This was not some logical extension of the European Grand Tour; these men and women sought to bring home information that would shape science, and, no doubt, further their careers.

Sketch of a Himalayan Rhododendron by Joseph Dalton Hooker

One of the most important of these ranks was Joseph Dalton Hooker, doctor, naval surgeon, mountain climber, and botanist. Hooker traveled to the Antarctic with James Ross, dug for fossils in Wales, and tromped up the Himalayas in search of botanical specimens (interested in, among other things, testing Darwin’s theories of biogeography and isolation).

If this whets your appetite, check out Jim Endersby’s Joseph Dalton Hooker Website, a nicely designed site with biographical pages, extensive extracts of Hooker’s writings, and a list of collectors who helped him in the field. If this is not enough for the obsessive-compulsive Hookerologist in you, Endersby has also provided a list of archives and secondary literature on Hooker to keep you occupied until the bicentennial of Hooker’s birth in 2017.